It’s April in Vancouver, which got me thinking about clouds.  Although the IT buzz in 2012 has been dominated by mobile and big data, Cloud computing is still a hot topic, especially since it is an enabler for both. In the public Cloud space, Google just launched Drive in the same week that Microsoft updated SkyDrive. In the private Cloud domain, IBM recently announced its PureSystems platform, which falls along similar lines as the Exa- line from Oracle.

It will be interesting to see whether or not big enterprises buy into this “21st century mainframe” concept but what’s clear is that enterprises now want to migrate critical workloads to the Cloud, en masse. To realize the true benefits of Cloud, many of these workloads will have to be running off-premise. But since many will remain on-premise, enterprises will be relying on hybrid Cloud infrastructure for their most significant IT services.

Security remains a major area of concern for organizations looking to leverage the Cloud. Increasingly, availability and reliability are also significant concerns, particularly since Amazon has had a few outages recently. In addition to addressing these concerns, enterprises are evaluating how they can optimize processing volumes to get maximum cost benefit from their Cloud deployments.

Please join me at the Cloud Expo, June 11-14 in New York, where I’ll be discussing solutions for each of these considerations. Hey, we should have blue skies by then!

I’m off to London for QCon 2012, the Sixth International Software Development Conference (March 7-9). I am one of the track chairs for this meeting. I’ve just learned that the show is now sold out but there is a waiting list if you haven’t already registered. All indications are that this is going to be an outstanding conference, so if there is any way you can attend, you should make the effort.

I’m hosting a track this Friday, called Industrial-Strength Architecture for Integration & Web Computing. Here’s how I described the track to potential speakers:

The enterprise is demanding more from the Web than ever before. No longer content with simple Web application delivery, the new enterprise Web has become an integration point between mobile devices, browsers, legacy systems and third-party Web apps. It is a difficult balancing act. The new enterprise Web is highly scalable but can also reconcile the different service level expectations across each participant. At its core, it enables agile product delivery while maintaining extreme reliability. In this track, we will study the architectural challenges faced by the enterprise that needs to harness the Web as a rich delivery channel — and highlight the real-world solutions that address these challenges. We will explore the intersection where trends such as virtualization, noSQL, JSON, OAuth, APIs and mobile apps meet. Join us to understand the fine tuning between milliseconds and dollars that can make the difference between wild success and disappointing mediocrity.

I’m fortunate to have a great roster of speakers, including Theo Schlossnagle from Omniti, Paul Fremantle from WSO2, John Davies from Incept5 and finally both Marcus Kern and David Dawson from Mobile Interactive Group.

I’m also going to chair a panel titled Integration at Scale: Lessons Learned from the New Enterprise Web. This one promises to be a very interesting discussion:

The mobile device revolution has upended our traditional view of the World Wide Web. The enterprise Web is now about integration: connecting any device to to any data, reliably and under wildly-fluctuating load. How has this affected Web architecture and what changes in the day-to-day operation of the Web resource? Join us for this panel of senior enterprise architects, each of whom has met the challenge of the new enterprise Web.

The panel line up consists of David Laing from CityIndex, Neels Burger from MoneySuperMarket.com, Neil Pellinacci form Tanzarine Technology and Parand Tony Darugar from Xpenser. Each brings tremendous experience to the panel and bringing them all together is going to make for a lively and informative debate. I’m looking forward to it.

Hope to see you in London!

Content is king – again. After years struggling to regain a foothold under the gale of new Internet technologies, content producers are once again finding their footing. With the popularization of smart TVs, smart-phones and the iPad (the ultimate content consuming device), content has found itself back at the center of the consumers’ entertainment universe.

For content producers, the ability to make content available across devices and through online distribution partners is dependent on opening up the content and associated metadata via APIs. Sometimes these content streams and supporting materials are just opened to select groups of partners. Sometimes this same content is additionally exposed to public app developers, so that they can build the latest and greatest apps around the content.

In either case, because of the explosion in app-driven smart devices and the APIs that connect them, content producers are able to develop new ecosystems, open new revenue streams and build new customer relationships.

That’s why Layer 7 is excited to have been invited to present at the Entertainment Technology Center’s quarterly Mega Session, tomorrow in LA. Coming on the heels of the latest iPad launch, our presentation on new API-driven distribution models couldn’t be more timely.

The 2012 RSA Conference is now over and as many journalists rightly noted this year’s show was as much about opening up the enterprise to the outside as it was about closing the enterprise from the outside. With the acceleration of Cloud adoption and the rapid growth of tablet and smart phone inside the enterprise, the need to manage how information is shared out securely has never been greater. To this end, Layer 7 gave two talks at RSA in addition to two workshops and a sponsorship of Cloud Security Alliance Conference around this general theme.

The two talks given by Layer 7 staff at RSA included one focused on access best practices for APIs called Enterprise Access Control Patterns for REST & Web API and the other focused on the threat implications of Open APIs called Hacking’s Gilded Age — How APIs Will Increase Risk & Chaos. The first was delivered by Layer 7 Director of Solution Engineering Francois Lascelles. The second was delivered by Layer 7 CTO Scott Morrison. For those of you not able to have caught the talks live, we provide the slides below. Enjoy.

This week, at Mobile World Congress, I got to see firsthand how mobile and Cloud are transforming the distribution of content. People want to consume entertainment on four screens: TV, PC, smartphone and tablet. They want their watching, listening, gaming and reading experiences to be 100% portable. They want instant, on-demand access to content. They sometimes want to own the content but they sometimes prefer to rent or subscribe. These changes in how end-users want to consume content are demanding a rethink of how entertainment producers deliver this content.

Cloud and APIs figure prominently in enabling entertainment producers to deliver content anytime, anywhere. APIs allow producers to expose content and associated metadata to “apps” that can be delivered via any smart device, including a TV. Similarly, Cloud computing creates the promise of instant content delivery to any device, on-demand. But for the content producer, exposing content from the Cloud, over APIs, across the Internet, to a mixed universe of internally and externally-built apps that may live on TVs, PCs, tablets or smartphones creates challenges around security and management.

Layer 7 offers solutions for entertainment producers and distributors who need to secure and manage content delivered from the Cloud, over APIs, to apps. That’s why, this Friday, Layer 7 will be exhibiting at the Hollywood IT Summit. If you happen to be attending, stop by the booth or catch Layer 7’s Steve Loscialpo giving a talk called Simplifying Content Distribution Across Mobile & Cloud Using API Management. Here are the event details:

• Hollywood IT Summit – Friday, March 2, 2012
  Pepperdine University, Malibu Campus, Los Angeles – Register here